Part 6

It was Mrs. Dane’s custom to serve a Southern eggnog as a sort of stir-up-cup--nightcap, she calls it--on her evenings, and we found it waiting for us in the library. In the warmth of its open fire, and the cheer of its lamps, even in the dignity and impassiveness of the butler, there was something sane and wholesome. The women of the party reacted quickly, but I looked over to see Sperry at a corner desk, intently working over a small object in the palm of his hand.

He started when he heard me, then laughed and held out his hand.

“Library paste!” he said. “It rolls into a soft, malleable ball. It could quite easily be used to fill a small hole in plaster. The paper would paste down over it, too.”

“Then you think?”

“I’m not thinking at all. The thing she described may have taken place in Timbuctoo. May have happened ten years ago. May be the plot of some book she has read.”

“On the other hand,” I replied, “it is just possible that it was here, in this neighborhood, while we were sitting in that room.”

“Have you any idea of the time?”

“I know exactly. It was half-past nine.”

III

At midnight, shortly after we reached home, Sperry called me on the phone. “Be careful, Horace,” he said. “Don’t let Mrs. Horace think anything has happened. I want to see you at once. Suppose you say I have a patient in a bad way, and a will to be drawn.”

I listened to sounds from upstairs. I heard my wife go into her room and close the door.

“Tell me something about it,” I urged.

“Just this. Arthur Wells killed himself tonight, shot himself in the head. I want you to go there with me.”

“Arthur Wells!”

“Yes. I say, Horace, did you happen to notice the time the seance began tonight?”

“It was five minutes after nine when my watch fell.”

“Then it would have been about half past when the trance began?”

“Yes.”

There was a silence at Sperry’s end of the wire. Then:

“He was shot about 9:30,” he said, and rang off.

I am not ashamed to confess that my hands shook as I hung up the receiver. A brick house, she had said; the Wells house was brick. And so were all the other houses on the street. Vines in the back? Well, even my own house had vines. It was absurd; it was pure coincidence; it was--well, I felt it was queer.

Nevertheless, as I stood there, I wondered for the first time in a highly material existence, whether there might not be, after all, a spirit-world surrounding us, cognizant of all that we did, touching but intangible, sentient but tuned above our common senses?

I stood by the prosaic telephone instrument and looked into the darkened recesses of the passage. It seemed to my disordered nerves that back of the coats and wraps that hung on the rack, beyond the heavy curtains, in every corner, there lurked vague and shadowy forms, invisible when I stared, but advancing a trifle from their obscurity when, by turning my head and looking ahead, they impinged on the extreme right or left of my field of vision.

I was shocked by the news, but not greatly grieved. The Wellses had been among us but not of us, as I have said. They had come, like gay young comets, into our orderly constellation, trailing behind them their cars and servants, their children and governesses and rather riotous friends, and had flashed on us in a sort of bright impermanence.

Of the two, I myself had preferred Arthur. His faults were on the surface. He drank hard, gambled, and could not always pay his gambling debts. But underneath it all there had always been something boyishly honest about him. He had played, it is true, through most of the thirty years that now marked his whole life, but he could have been made a man by the right woman. And he had married the wrong one.

Of Elinor Wells I have only my wife’s verdict, and I have found that, as is the way with many good women, her judgments of her own sex are rather merciless. A tall, handsome girl, very dark, my wife has characterized her as cold, calculating and ambitious. She has said frequently, too, that Elinor Wells was a disappointed woman, that her marriage, while giving her social identity, had disappointed her in a monetary way. Whether that is true or not, there was no doubt, by the time they had lived in our neighborhood for a year, that a complication had arisen in the shape of another man.

My wife, on my return from my office in the evening, had been quite likely to greet me with:

“Horace, he has been there all afternoon. I really think something should be done about it.”